Set back by a lockdown in Shanghai, an important manufacturing base, Tesla is now playing second fiddle to this Chinese EV maker.
Tesla, Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar EV company, is no longer the world’s leading manufacturer of battery electric vehicles (BEV), having been knocked off from its top spot by Chinese rival BYD recently.
According to data from CleanTechnica, Tesla produced a total of 406,869 fully-electric BEVs between January and May 2022. Meanwhile, China’s BYD produced 506,868 fully-electric BEVs in the same period. The data was aggregated by CleanTechnica EV expert Jose Pontes.
This means that BYD now represents a 15.6pc market share in the battery electric vehicle space, compared to Tesla’s 12.6pc, according to Statista, which also made this market share chart to show where Tesla stands.
Another Forbes report found that when looking at total sales – including plug-in hybrid models – BYD was still ahead of Tesla by almost 80,000 vehicles. BYD sales grew 315pc in the first half of the year, while Tesla showed only a relatively modest 46pc growth in the same period.
The next leading brands in market share are China’s SAIC (8.6pc), Germany’s Volkswagen (7.8 pc) and South Korea’s Hyundai-Kia (5.8 pc).
Tesla’s relatively poor performance can be traced back partly to its Shanghai manufacturing plant that had to halt production in the second quarter after the Chinese government issued a lockdown following a surge in Covid-19 cases.
A significant base for the company, the Shanghai Tesla plant was shut down for 22 days starting late March, significantly impacting its production capacity. BYD, on the other hand, was unscathed by the Shanghai lockdown because its factories are located outside the city, according to PCMag.
This follows “a breakthrough year” in 2021 for Tesla as it saw deliveries shoot up 87pc and the company generated more than $17.7bn in revenue in its fourth quarter with net income of more than $2.3bn.
In the full year, Tesla saw its revenue rise by a whopping 71pc over 2020 to exceed $53.8bn, while its net income was $5.52bn. By October, Tesla had reached a trillion-dollar valuation.
“There should no longer be doubt about the viability and profitability of electric vehicles,” Tesla said in January. “We aim to increase our production as quickly as we can, not only through ramping production at new factories in Austin and Berlin, but also by maximising output from our established factories in Fremont and Shanghai.”
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